The Walls of Galway
This piece is a bit of a departure from what I would normally write about, rather this is based on some tangential references and bits and pieces that I have come across. I am not an archaeologist so I directly cannot attest to the physical evidence but I have encountered several textual references on this subject (which allow for further textual readings of the physical evidence) and Galway is always something close to my own heart. This is not meant as an extensive scholarly work but instead an essay on how history can be illustrative of how we experience and relate our personal relationships with urbanised areas: our hometowns.
The idea of an urban area in the medieval and early modern period is often something strongly tied to walls and fortifications. Urbs in Latin is that area enclosed by walls, suburbium the area of the city outside (or ‘below’) those walls. Even in Irish, cathair is strongly tied to fortification and enclosure. Walls matter in terms of defence, law, and taxation and eventually the civic identity of those people living within them. Looking at Galway, one map proves particularly important in understanding how Galwegians – the people of Galway – understood themselves. The things that the mapmakers chose to include are as illustrative of how they saw themselves and their city as they are illustrative of the reality of early modern Galway’s urban geography.
The Pictorial Map of Galway – dated variously to the 1650s and 1660s – depicts a city that could not possibly have actually existed as depicted. By the time it was created, the city had been ravaged by war, disease, and starvation during a brutal siege and much of its population had been dispossessed. Fundamentally, it depicts an idealised Galway for this and several other reasons. The urban geography that it presents – the streets and the buildings and the landscape – are all likely accurate, but the scenes of life and activity are highly idealised. The walls depicted are very accurate, as we will see, but the proud city is an ideal that no longer existed by the time the map was drawn up and published. Looking at the banner flying above the clocktower on what is now Williamsgate Street, marked ‘SPQG’ (presumably ‘Senatus Populesque Galviensis’ - ‘The Senate and People of Galway’ - a play on ancient Rome’s famous ‘SPQR’), we can see an assertion of a civic ideal.
‘SPQG’ banner as depicted in the Pictorial Map of Galway (c.1650s).
One Galwegian who wrote at length about his hometown was John Lynch. Lynch is a key figure in my research: a historian and a cleric who lived much of his life in exile in Brittany and published several works of Irish history while there. One his works is a biography and eulogy on the life of his cousin Francis Kirwan, the Catholic Bishop of Killala who died in 1661. The connection should be apparent to anyone familiar with Galway, both Lynch and Kirwan being thoroughly Galwegian names. Lynch opens his Pii Antistitis Icon (Portrait of a Pious Bishop) with a description of a city that could not possibly have been the Galway of 1661, however. He describes Galway as the ‘oppidum Connaciae caput’ (translated as ‘the metropolis of Connacht’ but probably better as ‘the primary city’), with walls of ‘green marble’. It is likely that Lynch literally means limestone, but is exaggerating, as the rest of his description tends to be quite overstated. He describes symmetrical, ‘noble squares’ and a great population of prosperous merchants. Lynch says that Galway appeared to him just like Jerusalem looked to the prophet Jeremiah in the Bible.
However, Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem and Lynch experienced the destruction of Galway. Lynch was in Ireland during the Confederate Wars of the 1640s and he was either in Galway during its siege (August 1651-May 1652) by forces loyal to the English parliament or was at least held prisoner there after its capture. He would have seen a city where likely thousands had been killed by disease and famine and whose population would soon be turfed out in favour of English, protestant settlers loyal to the Parliamentary regime. The King’s Head pub comes out of this wave of dispossession and reappropriation with the property connected by legend to a man reputed to have been one of the two executioners of King Charles I.
Looking at the actual physical constraints of the walled area of Galway, it is clear that Lynch’s Galway was artistic licence at best – an attempt to exaggerate the grandeur of his hometown. Pádraig Lenihan rightly notes that Galway was easily one of smaller towns backing the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny. Limerick, New Ross, the capital at Kilkenny, Wexford, and Waterford were all larger, each with a greater walled area. In fact, the city of Galway was not even the largest walled area in its own county. The walls of the town of Athenry – which today also survive in better condition – encompass a larger area. The 2013 Conservation, Management, & Interpretation Plan suggests that this represents greater ambition on the part of Athenry’s founders, a hope that the town would become a hub of medieval settlement. Galway was indeed much smaller than Lynch might lead us to believe and it is might seem ironic that Galway would end up being the last Confederate stronghold, holding out even after the Confederation itself had dissolved. We can be certain however that Galway fell last simply because of its remoteness and because of the parliamentary need to take Leinster and Munster first and crush the Confederates quickly.
In fact, by the 1640s, Galway’s walls were still much less than the fortifications depicted a little over a decade later in the Pictorial Map. It retained its medieval walls, with only the addition of a bastioned fort – Augustine’s Fort – outside the walls in the early 1600s. This had been built over a ruined Augustinian Friary (hence the name) amid fears of a Spanish invasion. When violence broke out across Ireland in late 1641 the fort was garrisoned by an Englishman, Captain Willoughby, who was nominally loyal to the local lord, the catholic Earl of Clanricard, Ulick Bourke, and entirely hostile to the city burghers. Willoughby was a constant pain in the side of the city and raided along the coast and, as repeated in Hardiman’s History of Galway, massacred people visiting the holy well (also named for Augustine) by Lough Atalia. He was forced to surrender in 1643 and the fort was torn down shortly after, leaving the city with only its medieval walls. The present-day Forthill Cemetery stands in its place.
Augustine’s fort in 1603 and as depicted outside the walls in the 1650s, after it had already been demolished.
After the city joined the Catholic Confederation a major building project was undertaken to expand and modernise the city’s defences. Most likely, as Lenihan tells us, an engineer from the Confederate Army of Connacht was assigned to this task, possibly even a Dutch veteran of the 80 Years War in the Netherlands. Within a short space of time, Galway’s walls went from being the least developed to being some of the most advanced on the entire island, with only Limerick seeing similar change. Gunpowder had, since the late 1400s, forced a change in how walls were constructed. Instead of high, straight walls (which are easily destroyed by artillery), low, thick walls with projections (bastions) which enabled defenders to fire back on attackers from several sides were the new normal. These defences could be built in front of existing medieval walls to allow for a deep defence, with defenders being able to return fire from several levels, which was the case in Galway. Lenihan notes that the city must have been quite wealthy to afford such extensive defence works, suggesting that Lynch’s depictions of a prosperous city were somewhat true for the 1640s if not the 1650s and ‘60s.
This is what gives the walls of Galway its distinctive shape in the Pictorial Map. Two narrow bastions at each end covering the main landward approach to the city with a blunt bastion in the middle to protect the main gate from direct fire. Nevertheless, the defences proved futile as the parliamentary army advanced on the city, built three forts to cover the two main roads (Bothar Mór and Bóthar Beag, Bohermore and College Road), took the Aran Islands by sea to close off Galway Bay, and essentially starved the city into surrendering. The three Cromwellian forts are depicted in the Pictorial Map and the rough shape of one can still be seen alongside the Seán Mulvoy Road.
Part of the New Model Army (‘Cromwellian’) siegeworks depicted across Bohermore.
Most of the walls were taken down between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, with only some portions remaining presently. The most visible segments are very familiar to most Galwegians, the Spanish Arch and the section of medieval wall preserved within the Eyre Square Shopping Centre. Both are points of controversy with the Spanish Arch in a state of decay and at risk of storm damage from rising sea levels. The section of wall in the shopping centre may appear better preserved but received substantial alterations during the construction of the shopping centre and Dunnes Stores, with the addition of concrete blocks dressed up as medieval stonework, and which currently supports the glass and steel roof of the shopping centre. The 2013 Conservation, Management, and Interpretation Plan suggests moving the roof and removing the ‘fake’ brickwork and sham medieval street to create a more honest presentation. While I also would support this, there is a broader question around how to present the past. Is it better to present the wall as it is, without alteration, or as it was? While I would support the former, a case might be made for the latter.
In any case, archaeological work around these and other sections of the walls which do not survive have turned up artefacts which might help us understand the role that walls played in medieval and early modern civic identity. Asides from all the clay pipes and pins that represent the material fabric of everyday life, and which might be vital to social and economic history, stone plaques have emerged: visible symbols, assertions, of civic identity. These include a plaque buried beneath the Spanish Arch which commemorates reconstruction work on the sea wall here in 1647. The plaque carries the familiar crest of the city, a sailing ship emblazoned with a lion, and the statement ‘THIS FLANKER AND WOORK WAS BUILT IN THE YEAR OF JOHN BLAK FITZ NICHOLAS ESQUIRS MEARALTY’. It provides a visible symbol of the city - its crest - and names the mayor in charge that year, John Blake, son of Nicholas. It is an assertion that the people of the city were taking responsibility for their own defence in a time of conflict. Similar plaques have turned up along the course of the wall and at least two of these have veen installed in the facades of currently-standing buildings, one on Englinton Street and one by Eyre Square. Both simply carry the arms of the city, again providing immediately obvious assertions of civic identity embedded in its physical defences. However, in their current locations, they are essentially invisible to most passers-by.
Early modern plaques with Galway’s civic arms, Eyre Square and Eglinton Street (Google Maps)
Another Irish city with similar plaques and which still has many of them located in situ is Kilkenny. Like Galway, the medieval and early modern fabric of Kilkenny is still apparent in its layout and in many of the buildings still standing. Kilkenny too, was a member of the Irish Catholic Confederation (its capital for much of the wars of the 1640s) and suffered a siege in which one of the four curtain walls of Kilkenny Castle was breached and subsequently razed. The plaques in Kilkenny display dedications and dates, and as the ones I have seen are located by the cathedral one names a James Shee, procurator of Saint Canice’s Cathedral. A city close to the orbit of English monarchical power in Ireland (as Kilkenny was the seat of the powerful Hiberno-Norman Butlers of Ormond) another plaque here asserts royal authority, naming the monarch at the time of dedication (the short-reigning, protestant Edward VI, only son of Henry VIII, in this case).
Two early modern plaques (1647 and c.1547-53) by Saint Canice’s Steps, Kilkenny (own photograph).
Returning to the ‘SPQG’ flag mentioned earlier, Charles Doyle (with whom I am grateful to have had several conversations on this subject) noted several references to classical Rome in the Pictorial Map. It also carries a Latin poem dedicated to Galway and comparing it directly with ancient Rome. As related in Hardiman’s History of Galway, it reads in English:
Seven hills adorn Rome, seven mouths the Nile,
the heavens shine on their axis with as many gleaming
planets.
Galway, Connacht’s Rome, nurtures twice seven distinguished
tribes,
twice the equal of the heavens and the Nile.
Twice seven towers defend the city’s walls.
As Doyle handily sums up, ‘Like the Rome that the map harks back to, perhaps the Galway of this map existed only in the nostalgia of an imagined past.’ So too did Lynch’s homesick description of the ‘green marble’ capital of Connacht.
This nostalgia might still be with us to some degree, though I doubt any Galwegian would now be brave enough to compare the city with Rome! The RTÉ archives carry news and documentary footage from Galway’s quincentennial in 1984 (commemorating the 500th anniversary of its 1484 city charter). Among these news reports is the somewhat heady suggestion that late medieval and early modern Galway might be compared with the Renaissance city-states of Italy. It is true to an extent that Galway, a small Atlantic trading hub operated by its own devices, with somewhat uncertain loyalties and surrounded by hostiles. Pádraig Lenihan suggests this might be why the city built such extensive defences in the late 1640s, uncertain of whether the neighbouring Gaelic Irish or the Earl of Clanricard could really be trusted, asides from the threat of Parliamentary forces. As an aside, one item published by a newspaper in Galway to mark the quincentennial celebrations was the Pictorial Map itself. My fourth class teacher kept his copy safely tucked away, brought out only for history lessons, over a decade old and already yellowed by the time I ever got to see it. This teacher, himself an O’Flaherty, always seemed to enjoy the irony of teaching the history of a city which had once prided itself on keeping his forebears outside its walls.
John Lynch, The Portrait of a Pious Bishop: or, The Life and Death of the Most Reverend Francis Kirwan, Bishop of Killala, trans. C.P. Meehan (Dublin, 1848).
James Hardiman, The History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway. From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Dublin, 1820).
‘The Pictorial Map of Galway’, available online: http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/citymap/
Pádraig Lenihan, ‘Galway and the 'New' System of Fortifications 1643-50’, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 48 (1996), pp 69-91.
Charles Doyle, ‘Senatus Populusque Galviensis: The eternal City of the Tribes’, Western Classics (NUIG), 2 (March, 2019), pp 1-2.
Howley Hayes Architects & CRDS Ltd, Galway City Walls: Conservation, Management & Interpretation Plan (2013), available online: https://irishwalledtownsnetwork.ie/assets/Galway_Conservation_Management_Interpretation_Plan.pdf.pdf
